Come next year, some Apple hardware will begin featuring a new variation on the “Designed by Apple in Cupertino, Assembled in China” tag etched into it: “Designed by Apple in Cupertino, Assembled in the USA.” This according to CEO Tim Cook who, in a pair of interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek and NBC, said one of Apple’s existing Mac lines will be manufactured exclusively in the United States next year.

“Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac,” Cook said. “We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We’re really proud of it. We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it’s broader because we wanted to do something more substantial. So we’ll literally invest over $100 million. This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.”

Cook didn’t specify which of the company’s Macs will be produced in the U.S., but it’s a safe bet it’s the iMac. Already a few of the new 21.5-inch iMacs have shown up in the wild bearing “Assembled in USA” brands.

For Apple, which has taken a lot of heat over the years for outsourcing much of its production to Chinese manufacturing partner Foxconn, this is a big move, one that showcases the manner in which Cook is putting his mark on the company.

“I do feel we have a responsibility to create jobs,” he said. “I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job, but I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs. I think we have a responsibility to give back to the communities, to pick ways that we can do that … and not just in the U.S., but abroad as well.”

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